Daniel Cristian Stancu
University of Bucharest
The contemporary discourse about intentions and intentionality represents a central problem for philosophy of mind and nature of the mind altogether, due to them emerging in ontological and metaphysical questions about the nature of mental states (Jacob & Pierre, 2023).
The concept of intention has been understood as something internal in psychology. Wiliam James describes intentions in relation to actions as becoming conscious of our bodily movements because we remember the appropriate memories of that particular kinaesthetic sensations from other times they occurred (James W., 1890 as cited in Alvarez, 2016). In recent years the internal view of intentions as being internal has been adopted in neuroscience as well through the notion of action potential (Uithol et al., 2014).
When we’re expressing intentions we are not describing any mental process going on internally, what we do is to describe our actions in a particular context, be it past, present or future (Alvarez, 2016). Intentions describe sets of actions and not inner states because there is nothing inherently inner about intentions as they do not describe unobservable mental occurrences but the phenomenon they describe has a public criteria (Alvarez, 2016).
The view I argue for is the one Wittgenstein developed in his later writings, framing them as various forms of description that allow us to give a certain qualification of what we do (Segundo-Ortin, M., & Kalis, A. 2022). It expands the way in which we perceive intentions and gives us the possibility of overcoming problems faced by the causal theory of action and some misunderstandings of the use of the concept in the scientific world.
Bibliography:
Alvarez, M. (2016). Wittgenstein on Action and the Will. A Companion to Wittgenstein, 491-501.
Jacob, Pierre, "Intentionality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.),
James, W. (1890). The Principles Of Psychology Volume II By William James (1890).
Kalis, A. (2019). No intentions in the brain: A Wittgensteinian perspective on the science of intention. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00946
Uithol, S., Burnston, D. C., & Haselager, P. (2014). Why we may not find intentions the brain. Neuropsychologia, 56, 129–139.
Chair: Melina Bardt
Time: September 11th, 16:20 – 16:50
Location: SR 1.006 (online)
SOPhiA 2026 